ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS. 5 



from our superconsciousness do not have consciousness in and for 

 themselves. For the sake of brevity and simplicity we will ascribe 

 subconsciousness to these so-called unconscious brain -processes. 



If this assumption is correct and all things point in this di- 

 rection we are not further concerned with consciousness. It does 

 not at all exist as such, but only through the brain-activity of which 

 it is the inner reflex. With the disappearance of this activity, con- 

 sciousness disappears. When the one is complicated, the other, 

 too, is complicated. When the one is simple, the other is corre- 

 spondingly simple. If the brain-activity be dissociated, conscious- 

 ness also becomes dissociated. Consciousness is only an abstract 

 concept, which loses all its substance with the falling away of 

 "conscious" brain-activity. The brain-activity reflected in the 

 mirror of consciousness appears therein subjectively as a summary 

 synthesis, and the synthetical summation grows with the higher 

 complications and abstractions acquired through habit and prac- 

 tice, so that details previously conscious (e. g., those involved in 

 the act of reading) later become subconscious, and the whole takes 

 on the semblance of a psychical unit. 



Psychology, therefore, cannot restrict itself merely to a study 

 of the phenomena of our superconsciousness by means of intro- 

 spection, for the science would be impossible under such circum- 

 stances. Everybody would have only his own subjective psychol- 

 ogy, after the manner of the old scholastic spiritualists, and would 

 therefore be compelled to doubt the very existence of the external 

 world and his fellow-men. Inference from analogy, scientific in- 

 duction, the comparison of the experiences of our five senses, prove 

 to us the existence of the outer world, our fellow-men and the psy- 

 chology of the latter. They also prove to us that there is such a 

 thing as comparative psychology, a psychology of animals. Finally 

 our own psychology, without reference to our brain^activity, is an 

 incomprehensible patchwork full of contradictions, a patchwork 

 which above all things seems to contradict the law of the conser- 

 vation of energy. 



It follows, furthermore, from these really very simple reflections 

 that a psychology that would ignore brain-activity, is a monstrous 



